Overview
- Authors:
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Shadreck Mwale
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University of Brighton School of Applied Social Sciences, UK, Hastings, United Kingdom
- Invites readers to reexamine their views of healthy people who volunteer for clinical drug trials
- Investigates why healthy people volunteer for clinical drug trials
- Discusses inequality and ethics by using health volunteers of clinical drug trials as a case study
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Back Matter
Pages 141-150
About this book
This book provides a richly detailed contribution to the understanding of healthy volunteer experiences in clinical drug trials in the UK. Contemporary society, especially the West, has seen a significant increase in the production and use of pharmaceutical products, particularly for disease treatment. However, despite the large numbers of people involved, particularly in the UK, very little is known about their experiences in commercial phase I clinical drug trials. Shadreck Mwale critiques common conceptions of the terms ‘volunteer’ and ‘altruism’ as used in policy and practice of human involvement in clinical trials and calls for an awareness of the complexity of the terms and how the social contexts participants find themselves in shape acts of voluntarism. Based on extensive empirical evidence and conceptual analysis, the book presents new insights into the lives of healthy volunteers, challenges bioethical conceptions and generates new frameworks for policy and practice of FIHCTs. It will be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners in the wider social sciences, medical Sociology and medical anthropology, pharmacology and bioethics.
Reviews
“…Exploring people’s reasons, explanations, and experiences of participation, Shadreck Mwale refutes dominant understandings of volunteers as willing, altruistic, rational, risk-taking actors, and instead proffers a more complex picture of volunteers as socially and economically vulnerable, whose decisions to participate are shaped by the broader neo-liberal socio-political domain.” (Dr Oonagh Corrigan, Commissioning & Research Manager Healthwatch Essex, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
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University of Brighton School of Applied Social Sciences, UK, Hastings, United Kingdom
Shadreck Mwale
About the author
Shadreck Mwale is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Brighton, UK. His research interests are in health, inequalities, use and regulation of medical technological innovations in health and human involvement in clinical trials.
